The guys at Foursquare (www.foursquare.com) have set up what is essentially live updating social networking functionality, that facilitates p2p interaction between users, be they friends or otherwise. They just passed a million users I think and at some point soon they'll gain the critical mass necessary for entire communities to populate themselves on Foursquare's system. In addition, the generation of a Foursquare API is a masterstroke as right now, Foursquare becomes useful to the developer community, in addition to its usefulness to the retail (individuals) and business communities.
We're exploring how to harness this theme; what can you do with a live check-in that wasn't previously available, and within what contexts does this add value? We've come up with a couple of things.
1. p2p interactivity; One of our very first conversations when starting Juncanoo a year ago was about the possibility that these mobile applications could generate interactivity between individuals at an institution. This is the most obvious, and to some extent, Fousquare already does this. I suspect that the developer community will eventually wire the API to the benefit of niche communities.
2. Live Couponing; the possibility that a business could send coupons to all the people currently checked into their location, that are time sensitive. The most obvious benefit of this, for example, is a bar or restaurant doing the easyjet model (live pricing) to drive volume to specific products that may elicit low sales volumes at specific times
3. Live Directory: This would be incredibly useful in certain professional contexts, such as lectures, meetings, conferences, and tradeshows. Imagine going to a conference and having a searchable, categorizable, indexable directory of all the people who are checked in, with specific interests, and being able to interface with their social networks (add as a facebook friend or linkedin connection, or follow them on twitter), being able to exchange contact information directly with individuals, and tagging/marking that contact info for follow up, and being in live, dynamic contact with the conference manager who can give live updates and changes to the event that you can follow on your device.
The possibilities are endless, and expand beyond the arts and culture universe - we'll be looking at all of them.
The following chaps are doing it well
www.foursquare.com
www.gowalla.com
Check them out.
Ayo
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